Subsistence-Barter-and-Borrow Systems:
An Approach to West Virginia's Economic History

By Paul Salstrom

Volume 51 (1992), pp. 45-54

Local "subsistence-barter-and-borrow" systems, based mostly on
voluntary reciprocity, were brought to West Virginia by its
earliest white settlers. When heavy industrialization began in West
Virginia (about one hundred years ago), these traditional economic
systems did not cease to function. Their continuation subsidized
the state's industrialization. These systems have been called
"household economy," however, they may more accurately be described
as systems of exchange or distribution rather than simply systems
of production. These local systems have carried on production
largely through labor-intensive subsistence farming, and their
methods of exchange have consisted mainly of barter and
borrowing.

By 1726, white settlers began filtering into the northern part
of the Shenandoah Valley, including West Virginia's eastern
panhandle. The overall population of the thirteen colonies
burgeoned from a mere 630,000 in 1730 to about 2,150,000 by 1770,
and this unprecedented growth propelled many thousands of settlers
into the Shenandoah Valley.1 By the 1740s, the eastern panhandle
supported the minor industries of blacksmithing and grist milling,
as well as an iron furnace which produced pig iron.2

In the 1730s, settlement began along the South Branch of the
Potomac River and in the next decades proceeded into the southeast,
into the Greenbrier River Valley and other fertile valleys which
somewhat resembled the Shenandoah.3 Pioneers also settled along
West Virginia's north-central boundary with Pennsylvania, which was
then ill marked and disputed, and finally, in the 1760s, settlers
reached its northwestern boundary along the Ohio River and some of
its tributaries, such as the Kanawha.

In all of these frontier zones confusion reigned, particularly
in the Ohio Valley. Despite the founding of the ambitious Ohio
Company of Virginia in 1748 and the departure of French troops by
1759, it was not until almost 1770 that George Washington and other
speculators gained secure ownership of any Ohio Valley lands.4 Then
in 1774, Virginians narrowly defeated Shawnees at Point Pleasant
and this victory helped open the way for white settlement along the
Ohio River. The immediate onset of the Revolutionary War distracted
George Washington and some of his fellow speculators from their
western affairs, but it did not deter the westward push of
thousands of settlers.

Many of these pioneers achieved their livelihoods through a
combination of stock-raising and farming. Before the Revolution,
cattle farmers along the South Branch of the Potomac River were
also growing corn to fatten their cattle before driving them to
markets in eastern cities such as Alexandria, Baltimore, and
Philadelphia. A consignment of such stall-fed South Branch cattle
was sold near Pittsburgh as early as 1761 to help provision British
and American troops during the French and Indian War. Most cattle
at that time evidently weighed less than four hundred pounds, but
by 1785, the weight of South Branch cattle began increasing due to
the importation of several breeding bulls from Britain.5

Regardless of how much of their output they were able to sell,
most early settlers were dependent for their economic security on
what they called a "competency," the use of sufficient productive
property and access to sufficient land or other natural resources,
to allow a family to enjoy a comfortable living standard.6 Trapping
or hunting deer and other fur-bearing animals contributed to many
families' competency. Although major exports of skins and pelts
from West Virginia's far northern counties such as Preston ended
during the 1820s, they continued strong through the 1850s from
Braxton and other central counties. In the southwest, pelts were
still being exported in bulk from Huntington as late as the 1870s.7
Ginseng also continued to be a major export from many parts of West
Virginia well into, and from some parts throughout, the 1800s.8

Pioneer families certainly did not object to exporting their
farm or forest products to help them maintain their competency.
Prior to the 1840s, terms of trade were balanced between West
Virginia and the rest of the United States. Until productivity
rates elsewhere in the nation began to outstrip West Virginia's
productivity rates, the exportation of West Virginia products was
not the cause of impoverishment. Since the 1840s, the North's
productivity rates have increasingly surpassed West Virginia's,
resulting in an "unequal exchange" between the two. This was
particularly true after the expansion of railroads. Between 1850
and 1880, railroad mileage in West Virginia increased from less
than two hundred to almost seven hundred miles. Railroads made it
easier to export heavy and bulky goods such as timber and coal out
of West Virginia, and more feasible to import food and finished
manufactured products. By the 1870s, according to one scholar,
Midwestern farm products were pouring into West Virginia by rail
"in such huge amounts and at such low prices that local producers
were often forced out of their own [local] markets."9

Among the state's manufacturing enterprises that were doomed by
the arrival of railroads was north-central West Virginia's iron
industry. The more highly capitalized outside iron makers, who in
the 1850s began to use strip-mined iron ore brought by boat from
Michigan's upper peninsula, captured the local markets. Thanks to
the Great Lakes water route, Ohio and Pennsylvania iron makers
could import Michigan, and later Minnesota, iron ore cheaper than
could north-central West Virginia's iron makers.

This unequal exchange is measured in the amount of time and work
required to produce the same amount of market value, to produce an
equivalent axe, for example, or an equivalent bushel of corn.
Economist Donald R. Adams in a major new statistical study finds
that, even before the Civil War, West Virginia's farm productivity
was probably already growing more slowly than farm productivity in
the rest of the United States.10 Less work-time was required in the
North's industrial centers and on midwestern farms to produce the
same market value that in West Virginia still entailed a great deal
of work-time to produce. When transportation into West Virginia
became sufficiently streamlined to deliver outside products cheaply
to West Virginia's markets, the work-time of West Virginia laborers
was automatically cheapened in average market value.

The disparity between the cost of West Virginia and midwestern
farm products occurred dramatically. Between 1850 and 1880,
mechanization leapt forward on midwestern farms while on West
Virginia farms it did not. In 1850, the average value of farm
implements and machinery per farm stood at $82.53 in the Midwest
and at $65.24 in West Virginia. By 1880, the Midwest value had
risen to $121.60, while the West Virginia figure fell to $43.07.11
That translated directly into a widening productivity gap between
midwestern and West Virginia farms, which in turn lowered the
income of West Virginia farm families competing with Midwestern
farm families to supply West Virginia's food markets. As the price
of corn from the Midwest fell, for example, West Virginia's corn
growers had to sell their produce cheaper or fail to sell it. This
also lowered the "transfer wage" that induced West Virginia farmers
to accept part- or full-time work, which in turn led to lower wages
for many of West Virginia's wage workers (lower than the wages of
Midwestern workers).12

Despite West Virginia's increasingly lagging productivity rates
after 1840, there nonetheless remained at least two ways for West
Virginians to avoid impoverishment. One was to make the state a
financial center, a sort of Switzerland of North America. No
analytic financial history of West Virginia has ever been
published, so only in a general way do we know how the state failed
to become financially independent.13

The second means to avoid impoverishment was to maintain a
competency by keeping family farms of sufficient size to sustain
themselves without much recourse to buying or selling in the
market. Families supported themselves through a mixture of
self-sufficiency and moneyless exchange within local neighborhoods.
In fact, rural West Virginia has always been pervaded with local
bartering and borrowing networks operating outside both the market
and money economies. Economic anthropologist Rhoda H. Halperin,
studying similar networks in present-day Kentucky, describes the
system as an "informal economy."14 Throughout West Virginia's
history, rural families have practiced a give-and-take with each
other that was not based on legal contracts or even steadfast
agreements, but on voluntary reciprocity. In practice, families
performed favors for neighboring families which were generally not
repaid until a time of mutual convenience for both. Usually no
money changed hands, although rough monetary values were generally
assigned, at least in people's private calculations, to keep track
of the value of the goods and services exchanged. Until the early
1900s, money was so scarce in most of West Virginia that an
attitude of voluntary reciprocity perforce had to undergird almost
everyone's economic well-being.

Moneyless bartering and borrowing networks helped many West
Virginians maintain their competency. Subsistence farming,
bartering, and borrowing have composed the fabric of thousands of
local economic systems in rural West Virginia, systems that still
exist in many areas. A historical examination of these local
systems reveals that the outside context within which they operated
changed over time. In the numerous cases where families took wage-
earning jobs while continuing subsistence farming, as well as
bartering and borrowing, the combined income sources helped them
only temporarily. In time, it tended to impoverish them.

Subsistence-barter-and-borrow systems didn't require a family to
own land or resources, but both had to be readily available, for
sharecropping perhaps, or as part of some other exchange. However,
as West Virginia's population increased, arable land grew scarce
and an ever-increasing population had to supplement its
subsistence-barter-borrow income with other sources. Until the
1880s, major new farming frontiers further west drew many farm
families out of the state.15 Yet West Virginia's population
continued to swell, growing 39.9 percent in the 1870s and 23.3
percent in the 1880s.16

By the end of the 1880s, thousands of West Virginians began
turning for income to the state's newly opening coal mines. Most of
the miners' families could still partially support themselves from
the land or from land-based networking. Therefore, West Virginians
were willing to accept lower wages than northern miners demanded.
Between 1897 and 1909, West Virginia's average coal miner earned
only two-thirds to three-quarters as much as the average coal miner
in the United States as a whole for working at least the same
number of hours.17 The subsistence farming and informal networking
which the families of most West Virginia coal miners continued to
practice added up to an immense grassroots agricultural subsidy to
the state's coal industry. Without this local subsistence economy,
far less mining would have been economically feasible.

Looking back over this sequence of events it is evident that,
two hundred years ago, most West Virginians were relatively
prosperous farmers, and many were entrepreneurs. One hundred years
ago, however, many West Virginians became coal miners or adopted
other wage work in an effort to forestall impoverishment. The trend
toward wage labor did not bring an end to rural grassroots economic
systems. Instead, the rising capitalist relations of exchange
meshed with the traditional practices of subsistence farming,
bartering, and borrowing. Capitalistic relations were characterized
by contracts, such as labor contracted in exchange for wages, while
the traditional community relations continued to be based on
voluntary reciprocity.

The pace of industrialization in West Virginia accelerated in
the 1880S and increasing numbers of farm families who found
themselves growing poorer chose to stay in West Virginia rather
than migrate west, where enticing opportunities were fast
diminishing. Their primary option was to supplement their income
through wage work. The wages offered by coal operators were usually
low in West Virginia, but were still attractive because they could
be combined with farming income to increase temporarily the living
standard of farm families.

Many of the mountain miners' families did not initially relocate
to the coal camps, but those who did generally continued to garden
and raise stock. Writing of Kanawha County in 1896, a touring
organizer for the United Mine Workers reported,

"there does not exist the hunger and suffering here that is
found in [other coal fields]. . . . Every spot of ground seems to
have received attention from the plow or spade, the houses resemble
the homes of the market gardener. . . . This explains their
comparatively comfortable position. They raise all the vegetables
that they require and this assures them that the wolf shall be kept
from the door."18

As they entered the mines, West Virginia farmers probably
reflected little about their new dependence on outside forces
beyond their control. Many of them viewed mining as a temporary
expedient, a mere phase in their progression toward a state of
landed competency which they hoped to someday maintain without the
need for further wage work.

Gradually, however, the economic system of the employers
prevailed, trapping many "temporary" industrial workers into a
cycle of wage dependency. This cycle resulted from a ruthlessness
inherent in capitalism, and the self- defeating factors within the
local subsistence-barter-borrow systems. Engrossment of land and
resources by capitalists cannot be denied, but such engrossment
merely hastened a decline many farm families inflicted upon
themselves by combining their traditional subsistence farming with
wage labor. The labor-intensive nature of farming necessitated
large families with more children than the land could support.
Eventually, insufficient land remained to provide a competency for
all those adults whose labor on the land as children had been
required. The continuation of this natural cycle resulted in
ever-increasing population juxtaposed with ever-decreasing acres of
arable land.

Given adequate land, however, West Virginia families engaged in
subsistence farming full time could have remained virtually
independent of economic forces beyond the region. While these
full-time subsistence farm families were rarely self-sufficient as
separate households, they had access to more than the animals and
produce they raised. The family household got by, and often quite
prosperously so, through a combination of subsistence farming and a
prodigious amount of barter and borrowing of both objects and
labor.

These exchange activities did not happen with equal frequency
between all residents of a locality. Instead, they flourished
primarily within what Appalachian sociologists call "family
groups." As defined by an eastern Kentucky study, a family group
consisted "of two, three, or more family- households that were
particularly solidary and bonded together by strong ties of mutual
friendship, and frequent visiting exchanges, as well as by ties of
kinship. These were primary groups of siblings' families or of
siblings and their parental families." Beyond these family groups,
there existed "little cooperation in common tasks for the good of
the whole neighborhood. Few interfamily economic relationships,
such as borrowing farm implements or exchanging labor, existed."19
A similar organization of family groups, accompanied by a
comparable lack of community-wide cooperation, was documented by a
study of Pendleton County.20 Nonetheless, some of the bartering and
borrowing did extend beyond family groups.

Folkways can tell us much about the non-monetized economic
exchanges of rural West Virginia. If someone possessed an implement
that was not in use, another person could arrange to borrow it or
request help with the work he or she intended to do. It was implied
that the borrower would later repay the favor by lending something
in return, volunteering labor when necessary, or contributing other
goods at some mutually convenient time. Within this context, a
relatively poor farmer might contribute mostly labor while a
relatively prosperous farmer might more readily lend equipment.

Urbanites might suppose that the workings of such
subsistence-barter-and- borrow systems were sustained merely by
custom or tradition. However, the sustaining factor was short-term
economic benefits. Within this framework, several households had
access to every tool possessed by any one of them. Today, tools,
farm implements, and other productive goods are still heavily
borrowed and traded throughout most of rural West Virginia. Within
that exchange context, a tool or implement is valuable over and
above its productive value; it also holds exchange value. In
financial terms, this can be viewed as a system of leasing. It
could also be described as selling objects piecemeal to people who,
through their return favors, share in paying amortized attrition
costs which otherwise would prove too costly for an object's
nominal owner.

Voluntary reciprocity has not been studied as an economic
phenomenon in West Virginia. Money and money-equivalents, "in-kind"
values, cannot accurately measure wealth or income in a money-poor
but barter-and-borrow-rich environment. Until a method is devised
that can render subsistence-barter-and- borrow systems
quantitatively comparable to the money system, there is little
ability to estimate the real income or wealth of a state like West
Virginia, even at the present day. Ethnographic comparisons can be
made but meaningful economic comparisons between voluntary
reciprocity and monetized exchanges remain questionable.
Sociologists will doubtlessly continue puzzling over the supposedly
"self-limiting" attributes of rural West Virginians' behavior.

Evaluations of this "self-limiting," or perhaps "selfless,"
behavior have accentuated the negative. A nineteenth-century mining
engineer described the Appalachian mountaineers as "supremely
unconscious of their own misery."21 Likewise, a socialist economist
declared in 1940 that "extreme poverty comparable to that of the
poorest sharecropper, is all that the `self- sufficing' farm can
provide."22 No less a scholar than Rupert Vance has similarly
confused ways of life with standards of living. Writing in 1962,
Vance noted that during the 1930s, the New Deal's "standards made
at least half the population in certain Appalachian areas eligible
for relief" and that this "introduced the people to the money
economy and increased their wants. The depression, then," he
continued, "actually served to raise standards for many families in
the region who lacked contact with the American standard of
living." Vance hastened to add that the Depression "left the region
with a high rate of relief [welfare payments] and a low basis for
economic security," but let stand his implicit equation of "the
American standard" with a raised standard and not merely with "the
money economy."23

A recent judgement by Jack Temple Kirby seems equally
uncritical. By 1960, Kirby says, "millions of acres of
[Appalachian] land were abandoned. The shabby remains of
semisubsistence life on remote family farms were abandoned, too, or
mercifully executed at last by the manifold outside forces of the
commercial world, its demands of efficiency and specialization, and
the cash nexus." Yet Kirby mentions no viable alternative to such
"semisubsistence life on remote family farms." He explicitly
disqualifies the most chosen alternative: "Tantalizing hopes of
stable work in industries old and new were dimmed, if not dashed,
by the vagaries of the world marketplace."24

In two crucial respects, West Virginia's local
subsistence-barter-and-borrow systems depend upon the monetized
economy. First, their barter aspect is related to the market price
levels. As Karl Polanyi points out, "unless [a market] pattern is
present, at least in patches, the propensity to barter will find
insufficient scope: it cannot produce prices. . . . The principle
of barter depends for its effectiveness on the market pattern."25
Secondly, West Virginia's local systems rely on the market for an
often small but nonetheless crucial infusion of money with which
farm families purchase some of their implements and other
productive goods, or buy the few consumptive goods that are not
native to their neighborhoods.

Today's scale of dependence on corporate employers and
government subsidies in rural West Virginia has weakened but not
obliterated the state's subsistence- barter-and-borrow systems. The
many social and cultural consequences of this phenomenon have been
studied by other writers.26 The fact that voluntary reciprocity no
longer saturates rural life can be expressed in social and cultural
terms, but only an economic analysis will explain why it has
waned.

By analyzing this economic transition from the West Virginia
perspective (the micro) and then proceeding outward to the larger
United States market economy (the macro), one may better understand
the effects of corporate and government intrusion on local
subsistence-barter-and-borrow economies. Unfortunately, few writers
have adopted this in-state perspective, even when studying West
Virginia as an economic unit. There remains the tendency to ask how
West Virginia has affected the rest of the United States, rather
than ask how the United States has affected West Virginia. Only
when the latter question is posed can policies be formulated that
will allow the state to benefit rather than suffer from the
national context surrounding it.

Notes

1. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the
United States: Colonial Times to 1970, two parts, bicentennial
edition (Washington, DC: GPO, 1975), II: 1068.

2. Millard Kessler Bushong, Historic Jefferson County
(Boyce, VA: Carr Publishing Co., 1972), 82 and ff. Further details
on economic life appear in Robert L. Skidmore, "A Social History of
the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia to 1810" (Master's thesis,
West Virginia University, 1953), and William D. Theriault, A
History of Eastern Jefferson County, West Virginia (Bakerton:
Jefferson County Oral and Visual History Association, 1988).

4. Also active in western Virginia were the Greenbrier Company,
Indiana Company, and Vandalia Company.

5. Richard K. McMaster, "The Cattle Trade in Western Virginia,
1760-1830," in Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, and
Development in the Preindustrial Era, ed. by Robert D. Mitchell
(Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1991). For other details
see Richard K. McMaster, The History of Hardy County,
1786-1986 (Salem: Walsworth Printing, 1986), chs. 3 and 6.

6. For an in-depth look at rural "competency" see Daniel
Vickers, "Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early
America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 47(January
1990): 3-4, 13-29.

7. On Preston County see Reardon S. Cuppett, "Harrison
Hagans and His Times" (Master's thesis, West Virginia University,
1933), 16. Hagans owned a network of stores in early Preston
County. The prices he paid for various pelts are also listed on
page 16. On Braxton County see Festus P. Summers, Johnson
Newlon Camden: A Study in Individualism (New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons, 1973), 59-62. On pelts being shipped still later
from Huntington see Charles Henry Ambler, West Virginia:
The Mountain State (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1940), 453. Most
pelts shipped from Huntington were no doubt gathered further south
in the Guyandot River and Big Sandy River watersheds.

8. On the seventeenth-century ginseng trade in southwestern West
Virginia see Edwin Albert Cubby, "The Transformation of the
Tug and Guyandot Valleys: Economic Development and Social Change in
West Virginia, 1888-1921" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1962),
127-31.

9. James Morton Callahan, History of West Virginia, 3
vols. (Chicago: The American Historical Society, 1923), 1:197; U.S.
Bureau of the Census, Report on the Agencies of Transportation
in the United States, 1880 (Washington: GPO, 1883), 307;
William D. Barns, The West Virginia State Grange: The First
Century, 1873-1973 (Morgantown: Morgantown Printing and
Binding, 1973), 19. See also Nat T. Frame, "West Virginia
Agricultural and Rural Life," (unpublished ms., West Virginia and
Regional History Collection, West Virginia Univ.), part 1:15. This
crucial question of food imports into West Virginia invites more
research to determine its extent in each decade since it began.

10. Donald R. Adams, Jr. "Prices, Wages and the Standard of
Living in West Virginia," Journal of Economic History
52(March 1992): 206-16.

11. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Census of the United
States, 1850, 273-74; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Compendium
of the Seventh Census, 1850, 169, 322, 328; and U.S. Bureau of
the Census, Report on the Productions of Agriculture, 1880
(Washington: GPO, 1883), 4. Between 1850 and 1880, consumer prices
inflated 16 percent, making a real fall of 47 percent in the value
of farm implements and machinery on West Virginia farms.

12. See Jerry Bruce Thomas, "Coal Country: The Rise of
the Southern Smokeless Coal Industry and Its Effect on Area
Development, 1872-1910" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina,
1971), 200.

13. Basic sources for a financial history of West Virginia
include the annual reports of the state's Bank Examiner, which
began in 1891. In 1901, they became the annual reports of the
state's Commissioner of Banking. For the national context see Louis
A. Ruffner, Money and Banking in the United States (Boston:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1930). Ruffner was a West Virginia University
economics professor.

14. See Rhoda H. Halperin, The Livelihood of Kin:
Making Ends Meet "The Kentucky Way" (Austin: Univ. of Texas
Press, 1990). For a summary see Halperin, "The Kentucky Way:
Resistance to Dependency upon Capitalism in an Appalachian Region,"
in Appalachia: Social Context Past and Present (Dubuque:
Kendall/Hunt, 1991). For West Virginia examples see Kate
Long, "Barter Economy Serves Cash-Poor Residents Well,"
Charleston Gazette, 21 October 1991.

15. In the 1870s and 1880s, according to William D. Barns, "as
many as twelve or even thirty families might depart in a single
month" from some West Virginia counties. Their primary destinations
were Kansas and Nebraska, but many others went to Indiana, Iowa,
Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. Some went to California and Oregon.
Yet, Barns added, "West Virginia's total population continued to
increase." Barns, The West Virginia State Grange, 21.

16. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Compendium of the Eleventh
Census, 1890, I: Population, 45. Population figures
county-by-county are also given there for 1790-1890. The
county-by-county population figures for 1890-1930 are given in the
Compendium of the Fifteenth Census, 1930, I:
Population, 1165. Later editions of the census give later
county-by- county population figures. The boundary lines for all
U.S. counties in each census year from 1840-1980 are drawn in
Thomas D. Rabenhorst, Historical U.S. County Outline Map
Collection, 1840-1980 (Baltimore: Dept. of Geography, Univ. of
Maryland, Baltimore County, 1984).

20. John Craft Taylor, "Depression and New Deal in Pendleton: A
History of a West Virginia County from the Great Crash to Pearl
Harbor, 1929-1941" (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University,
1980), 124-27, 133. 21. George Fowler, "Social and Industrial
Conditions in the Pocahontas Coal Field," Engineering
Magazine 27(June 1904): 386-87, quoted in Ronald D Eller,
Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the
Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee
Press, 1982), 166.

22. Anna Rochester, Why Farmers Are Poor: The Agricultural
Crisis in the United States (New York: International
Publishers, 1940), 68-69.